


And Around We Go

by Copper_mouth



Category: Deadpool - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, Graphic Violence, Implied Childhood Sexual Abuse, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Minor Character Death, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Suicide, it's deadpool so it's ultimately temporary but still, minor post-apocalyptic elements, offscreen by a minor character, spider-man is not in this because he is currently dust but he is talked about a bit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-07
Updated: 2020-01-07
Packaged: 2021-02-27 16:21:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22160026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Copper_mouth/pseuds/Copper_mouth
Summary: Clint travels in search of answers after the Snap. He doesn't find any, but he does find someone willing to impart a new MO and a new philosophical goal in life. And a pair of deadly katanas.
Relationships: Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov, Clint Barton & Wade Wilson
Kudos: 15





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> When Clint goes all sword-wielding serial killer, it reminded me of none other than everyone's favorite regenerating degenerate. That plus the Feelings I had about Nat dying instead of Clint led to...this.
> 
> (I only saw Endgame once and I don't feel like digging too deeply into the timeline, so if this version of events doesn't match up with the movie, we have only my poor memory to blame. Humor me, please.)

He doesn’t make it to the compound before they leave to kill Thanos. They don’t wait for him. He doesn’t blame them. 

Natasha had to have called him, in the aftermath, but after the hours of frantic searching had turned up nothing and he had realized more than just his family had been affected, he’d gone off the grid. 

A change of clothes, some cash, and his piece had gone into his bag, then he’d kicked Lila’s dirt bike to life and slipped into the woods. 

He wasn’t going to stick around and play crowd control, wasn’t hanging around to rally the troops. He wasn’t a hero anymore and quite frankly, he just didn’t care. If he wanted to get his family back, he needed answers, and he knew where to go to get them. 

It didn’t take long for cell service to go out all over the country anyways, even if he had brought his phone with him. It took him much longer to travel than he originally expected, weeks spent picking across the shattered ruins of the country. Night after night spent staring at the unfiltered night sky, running their faces through his mind like a blade sharpened on a whetstone. 

When he reached the one place in the world he would have placed his hope on to fix this mess, no one was there besides Pepper Potts and an emaciated Tony Stark. 

When the rest return, ashen and silent, Stark stares at them for a long time as he leans on his cane, then turns and walks away without a word. 

And Clint knows it’s over. 

  


He hangs around for a while anyways. He doesn’t speak to anyone, not even Natasha, who is probably the only one who knows he’s there. He keeps to the shadows and the rafters, sits in the crawlspaces and listens to people weep. 

He hears a lot, enough to put together what has happened, what they’re trying to fix, and what they can’t. At night he stares at the glowing screens still tallying the global death toll, absorbing the faces that flicker past him. 

He’s not really sure why he hasn’t left yet, besides the fact that he has nowhere to go. He’s caught in the same thrall of expectancy as the rest of them, the one that grows taut and sickening even as it fades with each day that passes. 

  


One night he gets his hands on the footage from when Stark returned. 

He sees Danvers set the battered ship down carefully on the grass, sees a blue-skinned woman deposit Tony Stark into Rogers’, then Potts’s waiting hands. He watches the little group that coalesces around the exhausted travelers, he watches Tony lay into the Captain and then collapse onto the floor. He stares as Stark is bundled up and away to be ensconced into his recovery, where he should be. 

He turns off the video feed once Steve places the nanotech housing unit on the table beside a sleeping Tony. 

Without knowing why exactly, he knows it’s time for him to leave. When he makes his way to the door, though, Natasha is waiting on him. 

He stands in her quiet gaze for a bit, unwilling to break the moment. Then she speaks. 

“We could really use you here,” she says, and her voice is steady in the way that most people’s break, and he closes his eyes because he can’t. _He can’t_. 

When he opens his eyes again, she’s crying. Tears are streaming down her face, which is twisted up in concentration to keep from crumpling entirely. It’s the second time in his life he’s ever seen her cry. 

He pulls her into his arms, and she leans her head on his shoulder and sobs. He stares at the wall ahead, feeling nothing but empty. 

When she finally pulls away her eyes are bright and her face open. He can read her clear as day, just like always. 

She’s going to let him go. 

He feels abruptly dizzy, as if the wire he was walking on gained too much slack beneath his feet. 

“Thank you,” he breaths, then kisses her forehead. As he takes a step back, she sucks in a deep breath, and there’s a small smile just for him. 

And then Clint leaves. 


	2. Chapter 2

The night is damp and eerie as he walks. There are only a few insects chirping where there should have been hundreds, most of the survivors cowed into silent disarray. 

Tony’s words ring through his head as he goes. _And I needed you. That trumps what you need now._

He can’t fault him for it. After everything that happened, when all was said and done, Tony Stark had been right. And doesn’t that just grate against everything he used to hold true. 

The Avengers – they were the best hope for the world against a threat like this. Where were they when the chips had fallen, and it was time to save the day? Broken, splintered, scattered across the globe because of politics and a few hurt feelings. 

They were the only ones on this earth who actually deserved what had come to them. 

He could have been there, fighting alongside the rest, in Wakanda maybe. He could have helped. He could have done _something._

But he didn’t. 

The only thing he did was turn around and watch everything that made his life worth living waft away into the wind. 

He did nothing. Look where that had gotten him. 

A gaunt-looking elderly man in a truck twenty years past its prime picks him up on his way out of town. He doesn’t ask where the man was going, just lets gravity pull him into the passenger seat and pin his feet to the rattling floorboards as they make time. He doesn’t look at the whites of the man’s eyes, still showing even now, or let his gaze linger on where the man has bitten his bottom lip raw from worrying at it with his teeth. He just leans his head back and stares through the window into the dark. 

The man starts getting nervous as they make their way into the city, so Clint makes up some line and lets himself out near the middle of the Bronx. Not exactly where he wants to be, but he can’t work up any sort of feeling to care too much one way or another right now. 

His stomach growls as he walks, and he’s entertaining vague notions of finding some place still open where he can get something to eat, when he hears the sounds of a fight in an alley across the street. 

He pauses. Muffled thumps and cries give way to a loud clang, like something colliding with a dumpster, and then silence falls. 

He supposes…he should do something. 

Fuck. 

Jogging across the street, his aids can barely pick out the sounds of a very lopsided conversation – one voice shaken yet mocking, the other cold and furious. 

As he rounds the corner into the dim light of the alley, he’s drawn up short by the sight in front of him. He almost turns around and walks back the way he came. The last thing he needs right now is another Mask to ruin his day. 

Then a streetlight flickers and he gets a better look at the suited man towering over the bloody mess on the ground. 

_Fuck._

He knows this guy, remembers him from the files back in his SHIELD days – class A combatant, unknown mutation, no known allegiance, _do not engage._

Deadpool has one katana braced against the throat of the man on the ground below him, and the other seems to be impaled through the lower abdomen of his prey. Clint checks again. Nope, that sword is going right through the other guy’s crotch. 

Okay. 

He wishes he had time to stretch. 

Deadpool straightens and half-turns as Clint walks into the alley, only for their attention to be drawn back to the man on the ground as he lets out a shuddering, wheezing laugh. 

“That little dark-haired girl, with the curls? Sweet like you wouldn’t believe. Tasted just like honey.” 

Clint’s blood runs cold, and images of his kids flash unbidden through his mind. There’s a sick squelching sound as Deadpool growls and leans on the hilt of his katana, driving it further downwards. 

The man keeps laughing, even as gurgling sounds bubble up in his throat and choke out most of the noise before it can escape. 

“Good thing I got to enjoy each and every one of those pretty birds before they all flew awa – “ 

The man’s head bounces onto the ground and rolls, coming to a stop a few feet away. Deadpool yanks his katanas out of the corpse and pushes himself off, staggering backwards. The body slumps without the support of the swords holding it up, and it settles into a formless mass of blood and tattered cloth where it leans against the dumpster. 

His eyes are drawn to Deadpool’s hands as the mercenary cleans his katanas summarily and sheathes them on his back. Not many people besides him would have been able to see the slight tremor in the fingers there as they work. 

He sighs. His own hands twitch for his bow, though he knows well the lack of that comforting weight on his back. He’s been missing it for weeks. 

They regard each other silently near the entrance of the alleyway. He wonders what picture he makes, thin and tense in his stolen tac gear, no weapons or authority to stand on besides his own shrunken sense of responsibility. 

Though he has to admit, as the faces of Lila, Cooper, and Nate swim behind his eyes, that he doesn’t really feel too torn up about what he just witnessed, if the ravings of the now-decapitated man are anything to judge by. And men usually are truthful when they know they’re about to die. 

Deadpool takes a deep breath, and Clint shifts, preparing himself – and all of the rigidity bleeds out of the mercenary’s frame as he slaps his hands to his cheeks and _squeals_ like a stuck pig. Or, like a small child that is very excited. That might be the more accurate comparison, Clint thinks as he bemusedly watches the large spandex-clad man do his best imitation of an over-eager toddler dancing like he’s trying not to pee. 

“Ohmygodit’sHawkeye! Holy shit, holy shit I finally get to meet an Avenger! Everything _was_ worth leaving the land of maple syrup, shitty bacon, and pine-scented dreams, after all!” 

He blinks. Deadpool…knows who he is. There are very few people in the world who can recognize Clint on sight, and almost all of them have top secret clearance levels or above. He readjusts his evaluation of the mercenary a little more. 

Deadpool keeps on with a rambling monologue way too rapid-fire and high-pitched for him to bother tuning into, but eventually he stops and leans towards him, like he’s waiting for Clint to say something. Some kind of response is expected from him now. 

Uh...huh. 

“Not an Avenger,” he finally supplies on autopilot. He winces, wondering at his choice of opening gambit, but Deadpool just pshaws and waves his objection away. 

“Please, I know you’re “retired” or whatever, but that doesn’t mean you’re out of the game! You’re still you! And when you come back swinging into the ring like Michael Jordan take 2, I’ll get to say that I met you because you watched me unalive a child rapist! This is way better than the time Jessica Jones hit me so hard she punched a hole right through my suit! I was gonna keep it, you know, like an autograph, but the little piggies kept trying to arrest me for public indecency while I was _trying_ to do my job and unalive bad guys, so I had to sew it back up. Anywho! I don’t do that anymore, beeteedubs. Unalive people, I mean. I’m more on the straight and narrow path now, except not straight because Daddypool is an equal opportunity lover, and not very narrow anymore either, think I’ve had one or two thousand tacos too many for _that.”_

Clint’s head is spinning as Deadpool stops talking briefly to twist around and try to get a glimpse of his own ass. 

_What._ The hell. 

“But yeah I don’t unalive people for money anymore!” Deadpool continues, evidently giving up trying to gauge the size of his backside, now twisting his hands in seeming nervousness as he shuffles his feet in front of Clint. 

His eye twitches. The cognitive dissonance is bringing on a migraine that he’s pretty sure is gonna kill him. 

“I’m trying to be, well, it’s ridiculous, I know, ‘cause it’s _me,_ but I am trying, as best as I can. I just want to be, you know. A hero, instead. Like you.” 

The sounds of the city rush in to fill the silence, overwhelming him for a moment. Then he shakes his head, and it clears. 

“I’m not a hero,” is all he can say. “Not anymore.” 

The wind whistles a bit as another moment passes between them. He wonders what he’s even doing here. 

“Well,” Deadpool says with a shrug. “I never was one to begin with. So.” 

The mercenary sighs and hangs his head backwards to look at the stars. At least, that’s what Clint assumes is happening. Even for him it’s hard to see what exactly is going on behind the expressionless white eyes of that mask. 

Then Deadpool turns back towards him. A decision seems to have been made while Clint stood there, watching and waiting. 

“Wanna get tacos?” Deadpool asks hopefully. 

** 

They’re back in Deadpool’s safe house, sitting on the floor between piles of trash and stacks of ammunition, when it starts to rain. 

Clint pauses with a taco raised towards his mouth. 

The night before – before his family had – well. Before. It had rained like this. Starting suddenly, big fat raindrops hitting the panes a few times before the sky opened up and buckets poured down all at once. Long, rolling peals of thunder a safe distance behind the staggered flashes of lightning. The humidity of the air breaking gently, leaving a cool wind and damp mist in its place. 

It rained like this a lot back at the farm. They had a tradition, all five of them, of finding their way to the porch, when the lightning was a safe enough distance away, settling into the swing and the rocking chairs to watch the storm come and go. If it looked like it really might set in for a while, Clint would make popcorn on the stove for everyone to enjoy, salty butter the perfect counterpoint to the refreshing atmosphere of the rain. 

They’d been doing that for years. It was almost ingrained in him now, when he heard the thunder start to roll and saw the rain sliding down the glass of the windows, to want to call out for Laura and the kids and run to huddle with them against the wind. 

This was probably the first time in years he hadn’t spent a thunderstorm with his family by his side. It wouldn’t be the last time though. 

Clint sets his taco down. 

Deadpool watches him calmly as he lays waste to the inside of the apartment. 

He flips the couch over, picks up the bar stools and sends them tearing through the walls, rips cushions and kicks a flimsy bookcase into splinters, sends the debris already littering the floor of the room flying into the air. When he pauses, fingers twitching and muscles seething from the strain, Deadpool wordlessly hands him a long metal bar produced from somewhere, and he starts over again. 

A scream builds up in his chest until it’s ripping out of him, searing his throat and his eyes as his hands start to shake and Clint falls, limp and defeated, to his knees. It morphs into a word, just the one, repeated over and over as he cradles his head in his bleeding hands and bows beneath the weight of it. _Why._

His voice, too, fails him after a while, and the only sounds are the rain hitting the sides of the building and Deadpool polishing the swords in his lap. 

“That man I killed earlier,” Deadpool begins conversationally. Clint raises his head to look at him. “Was kidnapping and selling little kids to the highest bidder. Which was sometimes himself.” 

He stares. Why the _fuck_ is he telling Clint this now? Is this supposed to make him feel better? 

“I’d been tailing the guy for months, right? Finally had him cornered in his little vermin hole. Had all the kids free and running for the door, and I had just turned around to finish off ol’ Humbert when it happened. I didn’t know what I was seeing at first. Every single of those kids – poof! Ash, into thin air.” 

Deadpool runs a cloth over one of his blades with a light _snik._ “Didn’t even see him run out in the confusion. Can you believe it? Every single one of those innocent kids gone, and that scumbag was still here.” 

Clint leans heavily backwards until he falls against what once had been a very shitty armchair. The idea of apologizing briefly crosses his brain, but one look at where his companion sits serenely against the kitchen island dismisses that thought outright. 

“The wrong ones got taken,” Clint mutters. “’S no rhyme or reason. It should have been – “ 

He stops and falls silent. Deadpool doesn’t prod him for more. The wind howls for a while outside the building, and the thunder steadily makes it way towards the distance. 

Sighing, Clint drops his head against the broken arm rest behind him. “So,” he says, then realizes he has no idea what he’s trying to say or why he’s even started talking. 

Deadpool looks at him. “Rescuing kids,” Clint fumbles. “Not your usual MO, is it?” 

The mercenary shrugs and looks down, and Clint gets the same distinct feeling he’d had before that Deadpool was actually embarrassed, underneath all the spandex and misdirection. 

“Not usually, no,” Deadpool says. “But I’ve been trying to turn over a new, shriveled-up, avocado-leather leaf.” He brightens. “That’s why I came to New York actually! I’ve been trying to meet my all-time favorite hero – no offense to you Hawkguy. But Spider-man is the one I want to learn from. There were some rumors he was helping old Tin Can when the aliens showed up. Hey, have you seen him around?” 

He stares. Deadpool is facing him, chin tilted up challengingly, like he’s daring him to truly answer. Clint swallows. 

“Spider-man,” he starts, an image of a young, cheerful face flashing through his mind, surrounded by the hordes of others in the lists of the missing. “He was with Stark, helping him fight on Titan. But…he got snapped too. Man, I’m sorry.” 

Deadpool is frozen where he sits, katanas clutched in his hands. Clint doesn’t know why he’s apologizing about this, of all the things there are to be sorry about, but he recognizes the look of a man whose world has just dropped out from below his feet when he sees it. 

“But, but,” Deadpool sputters. “He – _that’s not fair!_ He was a _good_ man.” 

Anger flares in Clint’s chest for a brief moment. “We’d already established none of this is fair, Deadpool,” he growls, then takes a breath to try to center himself. “It’s just like my family, and those children you were trying to save. He wasn’t a good man. He was a good _kid._ He was only 16 years old.” 

When Clint looks back over at Deadpool, he’s frozen again. He watches for a long time, but the man never resumes cleaning his swords, or finishing the tacos scattered on the floor around him. Eventually, leaning up against the broken furniture and listening to the sounds of the rain, Clint falls asleep. 

He wakes up in the quiet stillness before dawn. When he looks at Deadpool, he’s still in the same position he had been before, though Clint can’t tell whether the other is sleeping or not. The door is opening in his hands before he hears a voice behind him. 

“What are you going to do now?” Deadpool asks him, voice strangely small. 

Clint pauses. “I don’t know,” he says, and it’s the truth. He has no idea. 

Deadpool stirs, setting his katanas carefully beside him in order to pick something else up, a dingy, once-white teddy bear that has definitely been around the block. He wonders where Deadpool got something like that before he sees the drops of blood staining one of its paws. 

“You have to do something,” Deadpool continues. “You’re a hero.” 

The teddy bear and a Desert Eagle procured yet again from somewhere Clint is unaware of, are clutched to Deadpool’s chest as he peers at him, the eye holes of the mask round and oddly hopeful. 

His throat burns. He has to make Deadpool understand. Hope is dangerous in the hands of a man like that. 

“There’s nothing we can do about the ones – the good ones, that we lost.” 

Deadpool raises his head, eyes still locked on Clint’s. 

He hesitates. “But, maybe. Maybe there is something I can do about the bad ones who’re left.” 

Beneath the mask, he can see Deadpool’s mouth stretching into a gruesome grin. “Here,” Deadpool says, lifting the swords towards him. “You should take these. You don’t have your bow. And I don’t want them anymore.” 

As he heads down the stairwell beside the broken elevator, he almost misses a step when a single shot rings out into the silence. He stops and listens, but after a few moments he continues on his way downwards. 

Clint reaches the bottom of the stairs and lets himself out quietly into the night. 


	3. Chapter 3

Natasha had died for nothing. Natasha, with her heart always carefully tucked away, just out of reach. She had loved his family, Clint knew. She had been a part of it, even if she had never quite allowed herself to realize it. Natasha, who – nobody but Clint had known, not really – had wanted a family of her own for so long, had thought she’d found one time and again only to watch it fall apart around her, no matter what she did. 

And now she was gone, and Clint’s family was back, and he was – he was nothing. 

He’d spent less than a day with them, holding them and kissing them and running his fingers through their hair. And he couldn’t stop looking at them, God he’d barely blinked under the weight of that breath-taking fear that whispered if he closed his eyes for even a moment, they’d be gone again. 

He hadn’t eaten or slept either. Just worked through the night making the old farmhouse livable again while the kids had slept in a pile of blankets and bedding on the living room floor, the most affectionate with each other he’d ever seen them be. Not that that didn’t make any sense, he’d thought. Or, he’d guessed anyways. 

He’d been scared to ask Laura, scared to know what it had been like for them, five years of dust. They’d barely spoken at all, he and Laura. 

When he first saw them, he’d froze. Hadn’t he imagined this moment thousands of times, dreamed of it every night and screamed into empty bottles for the knowledge that he would never, ever have it? But here they were. They were exactly the same as they left him, just like he’d hoped for. 

And Clint was – well. He was nothing. 

Laura knew, as soon as his eyes met hers. She seemed to understand more and more as the day and then the night dragged on. 

The good in him, for all it had been, that he’d carefully and painstakingly built up piece by piece in the years that she’d known him had come shattering down since the day he had lost them. It had been an excruciating, tedious process, supergluing legos where they should have just snapped together, the end result a misshapen thing, frail and brittle that required daily tending on his part for survival. 

He’d started the process long before he met Laura, but it was slow going. He had stepped out from under the phantasmagoric lights of the circus, walked away from the meager subsistence he had scraped out of other people’s hands to fill his own stomach, had tried plugging the holes in his sinking soul with the dubious achievement of letting SHIELD aim his bow and pick the targets for his arrows. He’d found himself in way over his head, and God hadn’t that been a cosmic joke, him an Avenger? It had almost made more sense to him when he’d been taken over by Loki and forced back into doing what he knew best – fucking everything up. The universe had seen fit to spare him even after _that_ , and so he’d picked his head up and he’d kept on, trying to pretend like he couldn’t still feel the ice-cold blue stained permanently on his mind. 

He’d taken everything he had gotten out of life with his own two hands, had fought and fallen and dusted himself off again, had trained harder, pushed further, scrabbled on his hands and knees in the dirt for everything he’d found worth keeping. It had been a relief really, to be confined to the farm, forced to quit fighting and straining and striving and just be. Nurture. Rest. Grow. Let the sunlight seep through his bones and warm the little sapling inside of his chest, the one that said maybe, just maybe, his existence was worth it after all. 

The sapling had been ripped out by its roots when Clint had realized what had happened, why the world had fallen apart. Where his family had gone. 

And Clint salted the earth it had sprung from. 

She knows he’s going to leave when the sun comes up. She’ll tell the kids something, she’ll rebuild their home. Alone. Clint can’t be here anymore – he’s lost that right. She might not understand fully but she won’t fight him on it, and maybe that tells Clint all he needs to know. Him leaving her will be the nail in the coffin, the last proof anyone needs to see that there is nothing in him worth fighting for, worth dying for. 

He holds her one last time, in the low light by the kitchen window. He can’t even bring himself to kiss her. She runs gentle fingers across his brow, searching his eyes for answers they both know don’t exist, and she doesn’t ask for any promises. He offers none. 

One last look at the kids huddled together on the floor, the best of him, the best thing he’s ever done, then he’s shouldering his duffle bag and closing the screen door quietly behind him. His swords are bundled inside, but his bow is still in the attic where he left it five years ago. 

He walks down the lane and turns onto the main road leading into town. He doubts there will be much traffic – everything is still so new again. He switches off his hearing aid and tucks his hands into his pockets. Head bowed to his chest, Clint walks on. 

**Author's Note:**

> Join me in pro-shipping, multi-shipping, Tony Stark stan hell on [tumblr.](https://copper-mouth.tumblr.com/)


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